On Cyber Warfare
In the 5th century A.D., Saint Augustine of Hippo authored what would become a cornerstone of Christian philosophy. His work, the “De Civitate Dei,” or “The City of God,” included one of the earliest recorded attempts at regulating and proportioning the destructive tendencies of warfare. This notion, coined the “Just War” by Augustine himself, would undergo a metamorphosis in the following centuries at the hands of intellectuals such as Thomas Aquinas, and eventually become a tenet of modern state-centric diplomacy. The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, as well as the Geneva Convention drafted in the wake of the Second World War, are all testaments to our will to somehow “humanize” war.
As we pioneer the Digital Age, there will certainly be efforts to codify “cyberwarfare,” just as we regulated the use of mustard gas and nuclear arms. Countries like China and Russia have already begun to do this, urging the United Nations to adopt “An International Code of Conduct for Information Security.” Such treaties are the most modern manifestations of Just-War theory, and assume that hacking a state’s IT structure is equivalent to military action. Contrary to popular belief, however, the Internet is not some kind of battlefield on which digitized nations conduct war. Instead, the secretive programs of the NSA, MI6 and FSS suggest that modern nations regard cyberspace simply as a medium to conduct the age-old diplomacies of surveillance and sabotage. To call these online operations “cyberwarfare” is therefore inaccurate, and akin to calling espionage an act of war.
The Internet is not some kind of battlefield on which digitized nations conduct war.
On the 16th of this February, Kaspersky Lab, a Moscow-based IT security company, published its discovery of an unprecedentedly malicious suite of spyware. The news reached notoriety after implications that the tools were created by the Equation Group, commonly speculated to be a subset of the NSA. One of the “worms” that was discovered by Kaspersky was Fanny, a highly sophisticated surveillance program capable of being installed in hardware, such as commercial hard drives, as well as over both public and private networks. Fanny is self-replicating, capable of cannibalizing the firmware of its host, and is thought to be a precursor to a platform called Stuxnet, which devastated Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz in 2010.
In its startling report, Kaspersky Lab included a list of countries that were targeted by the Equation Group. The list includes Russia, China, and a host of Middle Eastern nations, coinciding with the usual foreign interests of the NSA. The observation to note from this story, however, is not that Fanny and its creators could be abstractly linked to the US government, nor that Fanny, despite its colossal potential, is regarded as a prototype to what must be even more sophisticated systems. The overarching theme of the discovery of Fanny, and other spyware developed by obscure groups, is that cyber operations are anonymous and highly decentralized. The programs of the NSA are unaccompanied by any declaration or warning, and cannot even be legally tied to the NSA itself. Any attempt to apply Just War-motivated regulations to this kind of activity is nullified by the fact that it is espionage, which by its very nature is an obfuscation of state diplomacy, not war.
Ever since Snowden’s disclosure of PRISM, the NSA’s domestic mass-surveillance program, the public has been attentive to the online presence of modern governments. Never before has an outlet for diplomacy been so close, essentially intertwined, with the daily lives of the common people. Millions take advantage of the Internet, as do the intelligence bureaus of countries around the world. And as Kaspersky Lab reveals, these bureaus act anonymously and beyond the formalities of simple warfare. Therefore, we are unharbored by the treaties and policies that protect us from weapons of mass destruction, even though it has become evident that platforms like Fanny easily fall into that category. The prominence of cyberspace demonstrates the risks born of an incongruity between war and the pursuit of national interests.